A vice-president of a financial services company is harassed

Jun, 2016

A vice-president of a financial services company was being harassed with prank phone calls, menacing emails, and inappropriate postings to her Facebook page. As well, she found that someone had created a fake LinkedIn profile, using her real information. And on her fake LinkedIn profile were inappropriate postings that included opinionated posts and political messages that did not paint her in a good light—and might even get her on the radar of the RCMP.

The vice-president reported these events to company management. She had a feeling that a former employee was behind all these compromising posts to Facebook and LinkedIn.

Cytelligence was asked by management to conduct an investigation. A forensic examiner and an intelligence analyst were assigned to the case. They started to correlate the emails and the postings. They also created a “honey pot”—a file of information too irresistible for a rogue employee not to be curious about that is used in such cases to catch the culprit. The team also used geolocation to establish his approximate coordinates.

“All the signs pointed to a former employee who lived within a 2-mile radius of the vice-president. Other ex-employees of the financial services company lived much farther away,” said Cytelligence CEO Daniel Tobok.

Cytelligence examiners and analysts passed by the house of this ex-employee, to see what type of WiFi signal was coming to the house and who the service provider was.

The person who was harassing the woman vice-president had lost his job several months prior to the harassing incidents. In fact, he had been employed by the company’s Finance department.

“The employee was let go because he was abusing the corporate internet policy. During business hours, he was surfing porn sites and gambling sites and doing lots of other stuff other than work,” said Tobok.

Cytelligence’s detailed findings were presented to the financial services company and their lawyer contacted the ex-employee. They reached a settlement whereby the ex-employee deleted the inappropriate Facebook posts and the fake LinkedIn account. Longer term, the ex-employee was advised to “cease and desist” by the financial company’s lawyer.

“Because the client acted quickly to the harassment and Cytelligence worked so fast, the damage is not long-term. Both Facebook and LinkedIn posts disappear fairly quickly from Google caches,” said Tobok.